Garden Landscaping & Design - commerciallandscaping.info

I don’t travel much. As a matter of fact, all the flying I’ve done in my adult life has been because of blogging, and all my flights have been to much warmer climates than my own. Every time I’ve left my home turf, I’ve found the experience a little unreal. Unmoored from my usual routine, I’m bombarded by new food, new surroundings, and new people, and I start to feel like I’m in a waking dream.

Toto, We’re Not in Cold-Climate Land Anymore

It’s bad enough leaving your hometown to join over six hundred people on a mad schedule of early risings and late retirings, sandwiching visits to several gardens, thought provoking lectures, and conversations with like-minded strangers in between. But the plants . . . what did they do to the plants?

They Might Be Giants

They grow them big down there.

This banana plant towers over the people in Denny Werner’s garden

Mary Ann Newcomer, a normal-sized person who blogs at idahogardener.com, graciously agreed to stand by this agave(?) at Plant Delights Nursery to provide a sense of scale.

This castor bean plant at Montrose Gardens dwarfs the woman walking past, and is giving the two-story building a run for its money.

The heights that southern plants can attain in one season does give this cold climate gardener an Alice-in-Wonderland or Dorothy-in-Oz kind of feeling.

Your Plant Is Bigger Than My Plant

It also occasionally gives her fits of envy. Or maybe she is just starting to understand the handicap a cold climate imposes. Let’s start with rosemary. I’ve been very happy to keep my rosemary alive indoors in a container for several winters. It’s finally starting to attain some size. But size is relative.

This rosemary was growing in Denny Werner’s North Carolina garden. It even had a few blooms on it. My totebag is there to provide scale.

Same totebag, different rosemary. My rosemary. Okay, it’s been near death a couple of times, but it’s pulled through, and never has it looked so lush. Or so puny.

I can’t tell you how many times I inquired about an intriguing plant only to discover it was a salvia hardy only to warmer climes. (We call them tender salvias up North.) But I had once attempted to grow Salvia guaranitica ‘Black and Blue’ as an annual, so I had some basis for comparison.

Salvia guaranitica as grown in Juniper Level Botanic Garden, a project of Plant Delights Nursery. I hadn’t thought to use my totebag to provide scale at this point. Let’s just say shrub-like proportions and leave it at that.

I attempted to grow ‘Black and Blue’ salvia in 2005. This is what it looked like in August. I circled a blossom so you could find it more easily.

I just might try this vivid blue salvia again, but maybe I’ll keep it in a pot like I do the rosemary and bring it in for the winter.

Basil is another plant that likes the heat, something I’m thankful we don’t have too much of. (The heat, not the basil.) Take a look at basil, Southern style:

This basil thrives in Denny Werner’s garden, though it obviously hasn’t been harvested in a while.

Want to see my basil? You can’t. By the time I got home, it was already flattened by frost. History. Black and dead.

They don’t call us hardy souls for nothing.

I think other big things grow in Southern gardens, but I’m not sure what they all are.

As seen in the garden of John Dilley and Willie Pilkington, right down the road from Plant Delights Nursery.

The South: am I dreaming, or is this real?